Within a fortnight I was so deep in my task that, in the realest sense,
the greater part of my life was in the past. The significance of those
extraordinary peregrinations of ours had been in the opportunity they had
afforded for a communion of brain and spirit of unusual rarity; and all
this determined to my work with the accumulated force of its long
penning-up. I have spoken of Andriaovsky's contempt for such as had the
conception of their work that it was something they "did" as distinct
from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that,
not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and
literally, Andriaovsky _was_ everything he did, my tale will be
pointless.
There was not one of the basic facts of life--of Faith, Honour,
Truth-speaking, Falsehood, Betrayal, Sin--that he did not turn, not to
moral interpretations, as others do, but to the holy purposes of his
noble and passionate Art. For any man, Sin is only mortal when it is Sin
against that which he knows to be immortally true; and the things
Andriaovsky knew to be immortally true were the things that he had gone
down into the depths in order to bring forth and place upon his paper or
canvas. These things are not for the perusal of many. Unless you love the
things that he loved with a fervour comparable in kind, if not in degree,
with his own, you may not come near them. "Truth, 'the highest thing a
man may keep,'" he said, "cannot be brought down; a man only attains it
by proving his right to it"; and I think I need not further state his
views on the democratisation of Art. Of any result from the elaborate
processes of Art-education he held out no hope whatever. "It is in a man,
or it isn't," he ever declared; "if it is, he must bring it out for
himself; if it isn't, let him turn to something useful and have done with
it." I need not press the point that in these things he was almost a
solitary.
He made of these general despotic principles the fiercest personal
applications. I have heard his passionate outbreak of "Thief! Liar!
Fool!" over a drawing when it has seemed to him that a man has not
vouched with the safety of his immortal soul for the shapes and lines he
has committed to it. I have seen him get into such a rage with the eyes
of the artist upon him. I have heard the ice and vinegar of his words
when a good man, for money, has consented to modify and emasculate
his work; and there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone
conversation in which he told a publisher who had suggested that he
should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him. And on the
other hand, he once walked from Aldgate to Putney Hill, with a loose heel
on one of his boots, to see a man of whom he had seen but a single
drawing. See him he did, too, in spite of the man's footman, his liveried
parlourmaid, and the daunting effect of the electric brougham at the
door.
"He's a good man," he said to me afterwards, ruefully looking at the
place where his boot-heel had been. "You've got to take your good where
you find it. I don't care whether he's a rich amateur or skin-and-grief
in a garret as long as he's got the stuff in him. Nobody else could have
fetched me up from the East End this afternoon.... So long; see you in a
week or so--"
This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he
celebrated each year the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles. I doubt
whether this observance of the ritual of his Faith was of more essential
importance to him than that other philosophical religion towards which he
sometimes leaned. I have said what his real religion was.